IMPLEMENTING

LIVE STREAMING FOR

COMMON EDUCATION AND
ENTERPRISE SCENARIOS
Streamed video has become part of our daily lives, and we’re watching (and creating) more of it all the time, wherever we are and
whatever device we may be using. As often happens, trends in the consumer market begin making their way inside campuses and
corporate firewalls. IT admins everywhere are challenged to step up their game and meet the expectations of students and employees,
or else risk losing them to more progressive institutions. How can you embrace live streaming with any-screen playback for your
campus or workplace? Let’s dig in, focusing on three common scenarios and ways to address each.

LECTURE CAPTURE & BROADCAST

Let’s consider an example of a recurring class in a lecture hall,
at which a speaker will present to those on site plus a remote
audience of dozens or hundreds. You can take various approaches
to ensure both ease of use and appropriate content capture.
Ideally, the speaker won’t spend time making the capture and
broadcast technology work, but instead will focus only on the
lecture topic. Here are three possible ease-of-use outcomes.
FAIR: Have the speaker go to a local web page or in-room
appliance and press a Start button to begin capture and broadcast.
GOOD: Have the speaker or session coordinator schedule capture
and broadcast to automatically begin and end at set times for each
session.
BETTER: Set up a recurring schedule at the beginning of the
semester that automatically kicks off and stops capture and
broadcast for each class.
Let’s look at several ways to set up for capturing content while
striving for ease of use for the presenter.
SINGLE NETWORK CAMERA. One of the easiest setups is to have
just a single A/V input: a 720p-resolution network camera with
built-in encoding that outputs industry-standard H.264 video and
AAC audio. The camera will be pointed at the front wall, cleanly
framing a marked-off presentation area in which the speaker will
be standing and possibly projecting slides or writing on a white
board. There is a good-quality ceiling microphone above the
speaking area, feeding audio into the camera auxiliary input.
By limiting this setup to a single A/V source, especially by using a
network camera and avoiding encoding and screen capture, you
can eliminate many potential challenges and avoid any setup by the
presenter, who just has to show up. The camera output is always
on, and goes directly to a streaming server or service scheduled to
record and broadcast at set times.

Perhaps you’re still working on how to capture user-generated content (UGC), store it, and deliver it using on-demand streaming.
We have a blog post on this topic on our website, at wowza.com/UGC.

© 2016 Wowza Media Systems™, LLC. All rights reserved.

 DEDICATED COMPUTER. Having a dedicated computer at the
front of the room can be a good option if you have several
inputs, such as a USB camera, slides, a wired lapel mic with a
3.5mm or USB plug, and a USB ambient mic to catch audience
questions. The video output would feed the room’s projector.
(If you’re capturing a video source from a camera or other
device that has only an HDMI or SDI output, you’ll need either
a computer than can accommodate an internal video-capture
card or an external video adapter from a company such as
Epiphan Systems, Magewell, or Blackmagic Design.) Presenters,
wearing lapel mics, would present using the dedicated
computer, typically placing their presentation materials in an
accessible network storage folder before the session, or else
bringing their materials on a flash drive several minutes before
the session starts.
The encoding of the session would be done using desktop
encoding software, such as vMix or Telestream Wirecast. Such
products have built-in production templates (e.g., picture-by-
picture encoding layouts for combining slides and video in a
single video output). You can script such applications to start
and stop when the presenter pushes a Start or Stop button
on the computer desktop or, even better, at scheduled times,
eliminating the need for the speaker to remember to start or
stop the encoder software.
Part of the encoder configuration
is setting the streaming server or
service to use. You can automate
the streaming so no script or
presenter action is required. For
example, you can set up Wowza
Streaming Engine to loop a
short video file until it detects an
incoming stream from the encoder.
In Wowza Streaming Cloud, you can
schedule one-time and recurring
events, using cloud resources only
when they are needed to process
and deliver the incoming feed from
the encoder.
the stream on the server or to cloud storage. This can reduce
the load on the dedicated computer, and may simplify your
workflow for the subsequent on-demand streaming.
ON-SITE APPLIANCE. An option that can increase reliability for
multiple inputs is to use an encoding appliance. These purpose-
built boxes typically simplify setup, have built-in production
templates, and reduce maintenance. Some appliances meant
for in-room use have one-button controls for a presenter to
easily start and stop the capture, encoding, and local recording.
One thing appliances often can’t do is load presenter
materials. For that use case, you’d typically want to output
video from the presenter’s laptop and split the signal to both
a projector and the appliance.
You can set up streaming to automatically take place when your
encoder sends out video, or else you’d still have that workflow
component to manage for each event. Alternatively, NewTek
and Wowza have addressed this with a new 1RU rack-mount
appliance, the MediaDS (wowza.com/solutions/mediads), that
incorporates an encoder, production tools, a streaming server
with adaptive bitrate delivery, and even a player—built on
the power of the industry leaders in streaming hardware and
software.
Most appliances offer recording right on the box, to a flash
drive, or to a network drive. When using Wowza Streaming
Engine or Wowza Streaming Cloud for delivery, you can also
record the stream on the server or to cloud storage.
These are just a few of many options for capturing and
broadcasting lectures and similar gatherings, all of which range
in complexity, features, and cost. With some experimentation,
you should find a combination that provides the right balance
to meet your business goals.

Recording of the session can take INTERACTIVE TRAINING

place on the encoder, writing to
a network drive for on-demand
streaming delivery after the event
ends. When using Wowza Streaming
Engine or Wowza Streaming Cloud
for delivery, you can also record
Adding viewer-feedback capabilities to a live broadcast, such as
text chat or two-way video, can provide valuable interactivity
for scenarios such as distributed learning. One option is to
use a web conferencing service, such as Skype for Business or
GoToWebinar. Potential downsides to this approach include (i)
adding another technology set to administer, (ii) per-host or

© 2016 Wowza Media Systems™, LLC. All rights reserved.

per-user monthly fees that increase with audience size, and
(iii) bandwidth costs and Internet gateway congestion in your
network if the server technologies are not hosted on premises.
Assuming that you’d prefer to go with extending your
streaming workflow to include real-time interaction with your
audience, let’s consider the added requirements and possible
challenges.
LOW LATENCY. Whether you want real-time two-way audio/
video or just text messaging, you need to understand the
impact of latency. If a presenter says something, but due to
video delay it’s several seconds before viewers hear what was
said, any questions viewers ask—even as text messages—may
not reach the presenter in time to address them naturally.
Latency is an issue because most one-to-many live streaming
video today is delivered with built-in delays, helping ensure
that any temporary network congestion between the
presenter and viewer won’t cause buffering during the viewing
experience. In real-time audio and video communications,
latency is ideally less than 150 milliseconds in each direction to
avoid long pauses or people talking over each other.
You can read more, including how streaming
protocols factor in, in a recent Wowza blog post and video series
about low-latency streaming (wowza.com/low-latency-101).
SCALING. HTTP adaptive bitrate streaming (with latency
commonly in the range of 20–45 seconds) scales well
across tiered servers and distributed networks to reach
massive audiences. Conversely, real-time audio and video
conversations with more than a few participants are typically
hosted on a single server, limiting the size of your audience to
the capacity of that server and the network links connecting
to it. This is one of the reasons that some web conferencing
services cap audience sizes at 50 to 250 participants.
Adaptive bitrate streaming, which you may have
experienced from services such as Hulu and Netflix, adapts
every few seconds to changing bandwidth and playback
conditions, sometimes getting a bit fuzzier for a few seconds if
conditions degrade and then snapping back to a higher quality
as conditions improve. The goal is to ensure uninterrupted
playback, even if the video quality occasionally varies.
For real-time audio & video communications with latency of
less than 150ms, Wowza Streaming Engine can deliver low-
latency Flash streaming for infrastructures where Flash is still
supported. Wowza Streaming Engine also recently added
support for WebRTC streaming. Both technologies can
scale up by using more powerful computers with sufficient
bandwidth.
What about situations where the massive scaling and broader
client reach of HTTP adaptive bitrate streaming is needed for
your interactive sessions, or where you need only text chat,
and a little more latency is acceptable? Wowza Streaming
Engine also provides low-latency settings that can reduce
real-world audio and video latency to 1-2 seconds. Wowza
Streaming Engine has built-in WebSocket and HTTP Provider
capabilities that allow you to build and host text chat on the
same server you stream from. You can also embed a text chat
area on your event web page using a low-cost third-party text
chat service to handle the messaging.
ALL-HANDS MEETINGS & ON-CAMPUS
EVENTS
Many organizations get their start in live streaming with a
decision to stream their next all-hands meeting, graduation
ceremony, TV-like streaming channel, etc., to the whole
company or student body. Although streaming at scale outside
the firewall has become relatively easy with HTTP adaptive
bitrate streaming across a CDN, the IT staff often discovers
quickly that scaling out to a very large audience within the
firewall can be a big challenge.
If you have an organization with hundreds or thousands of
simultaneous viewers in one or more buildings or campuses,
proceed with caution.
Here are your three primary options.
UNICAST. There are two main forms
of live unicast streaming, in which
each client goes to an upstream
application server to request the video.
• Direct streaming. Each client
goes directly to an origin
streaming server and requests the content. This is the
least scalable approach, as all streams go back to a single
server and potentially clog a single network segment.
Assuming sufficient network throughput, scaling is
achieved by scaling up to a server with more capacity.
© 2016 Wowza Media Systems™, LLC. All rights reserved.
 • Tiered architecture. In a tiered model, whether
you are using traditional or HTTP streaming, you
offload streaming from the origin server by fanning
distribution out to edge servers in subnets throughout
the organization’s or campus’s network, minimizing
streaming traffic across major network segments.
This typically adds a cost and management burden to
support the edge servers. In some cases, especially
when using only HTTP streaming, you may be able
to make use of existing web caching servers and
appliances.
MULTICAST. IP multicast
streaming, much like an old-
fashioned TV tower, sends out
one signal on a network that
any viewer can “tune in” to via
their local router. It therefore
requires that all of your network
routers are multicast-enabled, which typically involves
either configuration changes or a potentially costly network
hardware upgrade. It may not satisfactorily address any
Wi-Fi streaming bottlenecks in the network, leading to poor
playback experiences, so organizations sometimes block live
streaming over Wi-Fi. When Wi-Fi streaming does work well,
multicast is arguably the most efficient way to deliver a live
stream.
PEER-TO-PEER. Peer-
to-peer (P2P) streaming,
also referred to as
application multicast,
peer acceleration,
grid delivery, and
mesh networking, spreads the
stream from an origin seed server to one or more nodes
in each subnet, which then share the stream with others
in that subnet. When designed properly, this offloads the
vast majority of network traffic from major segments
and onto local routers. Unfortunately, peer-to-peer
streaming originally got a bad reputation among network
administrators, both for the language the P2P clients were
based on (Java) and the association with applications
such as Napster and BitTorrent. Today, with the use of
WebRTC and HTML5 for native in-browser plug-in-less
To learn more about how others are using Wowza streaming technology, visit wowza.com or contact sales@wowza.com.
© 2016 Wowza Media Systems™, LLC. All rights reserved. “Wowza” and other identified trademarks are either registered or claimed trademarks of
Wowza Media Systems, LLC; visit wowza.com/legal/trademarks for more information. Third-party trademarks are property of their respective
owners; their use does not imply endorsement of Wowza products or services by the trademark owner.
playback, those concerns have mostly diminished. Want to
know more? Read a detailed discussion of P2P streaming,
multicast, and unicast (wowza.com/P2P-streaming).
WHICHEVER DISTRIBUTION METHOD MAKES THE MOST
SENSE TO YOU, WOWZA CAN HELP.
• Wowza Streaming Engine software delivers unicast
streams directly and via tiered networks using both
traditional streaming formats and cacheable HTTP
formats. We even provide a free load-balancer
application, and for networks with dozens of edge
servers, a free multi-server management tool. For
a more packaged approach, you can also deploy a
solution such as Kaltura eCDN, powered by Wowza.
• For multicast, Wowza Streaming Engine delivers
traditional MPEG-TS and RTP multicast streams, which
work natively with players such as QuickTime and VLC.
For even better performance and to avoid client-side
player installations, Wowza Streaming Engine also
powers Ramp AltitudeCDN Multicast+ (see wowza
.com/HTML5-ramp), a recent innovation that delivers
HTML5-browser-compliant HTTP streaming to
desktops tunneled through multicast, giving you a great
blend of network and playback benefits.
• On the P2P side, Wowza Streaming Engine software
can act as the origin and rollover servers for peer
streaming solutions from Hive Streaming, Viblast,
Streamroot, Peer5, and others.
Summary
Whether you’re helping your organization broadcast
live presentations to a small group, interact with
remote training participants, or reach everybody
at once, the common options we’ve covered here
should help you understand some key alternatives
and decision points. Do you have more questions?
Find detailed information, how-to videos, case
studies, and more at wowza.com.